The events described in the book take place in Scotland, in Galloway – a small community of painters and fishers. Lord Peter Wimsey can’t paint, so he has to fish from time to time to belong; so he does. One day though, an extremely obnoxious and unpopular painter named Campbell is found dead in a burn, an unfinished picture drying in the sun up the hill. It’s assumed an accident at first – it would be easier than easy for the painter to slip while working on his picture and fall down the slope breaking his neck. But Lord Peter Wimsey has a different opinion. Murder, he says. The police believe him, since his capabilities in the field of investigating murders is well known. Lord Peter Wimsey gets to work helping with the investigation.

Among the residents of the place there are many who might wish Campbell dead, but six of them have especially strong motives. And it so happens that they all disappear on the day of the murder, only to be found later, five of them with the most incredible stories of where they had been. The sixth of them has an airtight alibi… unless he had an accomplice. Each of them could have committed a murder. Well, whodunit?

Dorothy L. Sayers’s English is far less smooth than the language of her contemporary writers like Agatha Christie or Patricia Wentworth. It’s rougher, harder to understand – and in the case of this particular book the difficulties are increased by the fact that most of the characters talk with a strong Scottish accent, which the author faithfully reproduces in writing. I soon learned to substitute “where” for “whair”, “know” for “ken” and “doubted” for “dooted”, but that wasn’t all. A cockney chaffeur wasn’t really a problem: being a foreign reader I might not understand spoken cockney very well, but I’m used to the written version of it – so many English writers seem to be fond of it. But a “reverse-cockney” butler was a bit of a surprise. His habit of adding an unnecessary H in front of every word supposed to start with a vowel wasn’t quite what I expected. And then, as if all the above weren’t already enough for this poor foreigner, the author brought in a fresh witness with a lisp and replaced every S and half of the C’s with a TH.

No wonder it was 4.15 a.m. when I finished. The mystery was worth it, however. I’d bet you’ll never guess the solution until you’ve read the book in its entirety – or, alternately, looked it up – and the stories of the five red herrings are fun in themselves. The characters are painstakingly drawn too, each of them as different from everyone else as we all are in real life – one has to marvel at the writer’s skill and imagination where it comes to inventing personalities, as, from what I understand, nobody of them actually copies any real person she might have met.

A highy recommended book.

The daughter – a brave and decisive young lady – hired Poirot to investigate the murder and prove her mother’s innocence beyond doubt – so she could get married happily, have children and live a normal life unmarred by the grim shadows of the past.

Poirot hesitated – after all, sixteen years had passed since the day of the crime – but young Carla Lemarchant flattered him, and finally he agreed to take upon the impossible task.

In order to obtain the facts necessary for his investigation, he approached five people who were present in the house at the time of the crime (“five little pigs”), talked to them and got each of them to write up a narrative containing their personal perception of events preceding the crime – and the crime itself – as they remembered it.

The more he read, the more desperately impossible his mission looked – and yet he succeeded. He succeeded when things looked so hopeless that even Carla herself was prepared to give it all up. “The accepted version of certain facts is not necessarily the true one”, said he, and proved it with multiple examples as he narrated his own version of events in front of all the people involved in the case gathered, as is traditional with Hercule Poirot mysteries, in one big room to listen to him. The clue to the case was there – in the disproval of accepted versions of facts.

I’ll say no more…